13 Answers
13

The problem is that if a drive has failed you once, you can't trust it. In almost every case, the value of the data you are proposing to store, plus the potential costs of loss or recovery if that data gets lost, exceeds the cost of a new drive.

If the data you are proposing to store has any value to you at all, don't use the drive. Buy a replacement.

I might consider using it in a RAID-1 if I was desperate, and even then probably only for 100% scratch (ie local working storage on a compute node).

The alternative is to convince yourself you have a controller issue, and that's why the disk got corrupted. If you buy another disk and almost immediately have the same problems, then that's possible, and you can probably use the first disk in another computer.

+1. Disks are cheap. Once it's failed once I wouldn't trust it with any data I didn't mind losing.
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theotherreceiveJul 13 '09 at 14:14

+1 Disks are WAY too cheap to be bothered with a failed drive. Just to clarify though, some people think a "failed drive" is when some file goes missing, gets corrupted, or some other "voodoo". I know of at least one situation where a business was going to replace an entire PC (and HDDs) because they had a virus that wiped out some Windows system files. Best Buy told them it was a "bad hard drive". ;-)
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KPWINCJul 13 '09 at 16:00

3

This is why it's important to run a low-level diagnostic against the drive to make sure there isn't just some fluke corruption. Simply tossing the disk without diagnosing the true problem doesn't make a lot of sense.
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Russ WarrenJul 13 '09 at 16:06

2

When Best Buy is a business's tech support, that tells you a lot already.
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DavidJul 13 '09 at 16:35

seriously, who the heck is desperate enough to use a failed hard drive... ever?
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KeithJul 17 '09 at 19:02

It probably has a 3 or 5 year warranty. Send it back and get a new one (or refurb). Don't be afraid of refurbs. Many drives get returned to the mfg with zero trouble (BIOS problems, software scrambled the data, bad controller, funky software RAID, etc).

+1 for the magnet comment. They are SERIOUSLY STRONG magnets and a lot of fun. Be careful though, they're extremely brittle as well.
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KPWINCJul 13 '09 at 15:55

1

If you don't remove them from the metal plate, they're strong enough and shaped right to hold up things like oven mitts. On the oven, not the fridge, but the idea is the same.
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chrisJul 13 '09 at 21:55

Better than just reformatting would be to overwrite the whole disk with data. Then the drive has a chance to remap flaky sectors with spare ones.

You could check the reallocation count in the SMART data (e.g. with smartmontools) before and after overwriting to get an idea how many sectors were bad. You should also check regularly to see if the reallocation count went up.

In theory formatting the disk should be enough to make sure that new data is written to disk but I wouldn't trust that some tool wouldn't try to read an "unused" sector and tripped over a read error. Also its nice to know the amount of bad sectors beforehand.

If you don't trust the disk any more use it in some kind of RAID setup i.e. in a mirror or RAID5. Not trusting a single disk is always a good idea ;-)

I had this happen to me plenty of times, I didn't bothering setting up Nagios to monitor the hard drives SMART status and hard drives kept reporting failures (plead guilty for not doing any or not knowing actually) but nothing would happen to the server, it would remain up and working.

Until the hard drive really starts pucking up. The whole RAID array starts getting corrupted instead, happened with 3Ware and Adaptec controllers, then I end up having to fsck the file system with a lot of corrupted files, which seemed like an eternity when the clients are begging for the server to be back.

So I really would recommend just using it somewhere that you don't care about your data, or if the hard drive is not that old, RMA it. Both Seagate and WD have impressive RMA procedures and you usually get a refurbished hard drive, sometimes with even bigger capacity.

However, don't touch Seagate hard drives. I have lost all my trust in them, I have had a good 25% failure rate of those hard drives, from different distributors too. NS or AS version, they all failed. I have been using WD RE3 and it's been great.

Yah, disks are so cheap now. It all depends on how critical the data stored on it is. I might just use as a secondary backup or just a scrap drive. Personaly, I would not risk any data stored primarily on it. I have had too many disks crash to ever care about unreliable drives again.

Once I know a drive gives me issues, the sledge hammer of justice delivers!

If a disk even looks like it might fail, you need to toss it and get a new one ASAP. HDD's are probably one of the top two components most likely to fail in a running system (the other being cheap crappy power supplies in my experience). Unless the data on the disk is absolutely worthless, you need to replace it with a new disk. (eg you are using it as a temporary cache/proxy, and you don't care if you lose the data or not)